Cost reductions meant survival, but not profitability,
You’ll see that without theory, we’re at sea without a sextant.
With the lens of Jobs to Be Done, the Medtronic team and Innosight (including my coauthor David Duncan) started research afresh in India. The team visited hospitals and care facilities, interviewing m...
When we so heavily focus on providing our children with resources, we need to ask ourselves a new set of questions: Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop...
When we buy a product, we essentially hire something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a cr...
When the organization’s capabilities reside primarily in its people, changing capabilities to address the new problems is relatively simple. But when the capabilities have come to reside in processes...
What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to...
What could happen if we changed our emphasis from push to pull? What if much more of the $143 billion spent on official development assistance in 2016 was channeled to support direct market-creation e...
What are the important, unsatisfied jobs in your own life, and in the lives of those closest to you? Flesh out the circumstances of these jobs, and the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of...
We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause...
We could cite many cases of companies’ similar attempts to create new-growth platforms after the core business had matured. They follow an all-too-similar pattern. When the core business approaches ma...
WHEN YOU WERE ten years old and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible. Astronaut. Archaeologist. Fireman. Baseball player. The first female president of th...
Using flawed segmentation schemes, they often introduce products that customers don’t want, because they aim at a target that is irrelevant to what customers are trying to get done.
Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its secret sauce. Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schae...
To understand how revolutionary Pasteur’s contributions were, consider the previously popular ideas that attempted to explain why people got sick. For nearly two thousand years, the medical profession...
Throughout this book we will refer to jobs in shorthand, simplistic terms for ease of reference—but it’s important to emphasize that a well-defined job is multilayered and complex. And that is actuall...
This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.
This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.
The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to deve...